God gave me a dream.
God showed me in a dream the armies of King David, a man after God’s Heart, re-taking the city of Jerusalem. After the battle had been fought, David and his men went into the city and into the temple and found the Bible. All of the books had been collected, even the books to be written long after his life comprised its pages. When David and his men opened the book, all of the words were all but faded. You could still see them, but the pages needed to be restored. This angered and grieved David, the fact that the words were faded and almost gone from existence. There arose a schism at that moment as King David commanded that the book, along with everything that was used to hold it up to be seen by the people was to be restored. Some of David’s men were fine with the faded pages and saw no need to restore it, nor the things that held the book up to be seen by the people, as the restoration of this seemingly small thing would take so much work. This angered King David and he was willing to go to war again for the book to be restored, even the seemingly insignificant things that held the book up to be seen by the people, to be restored. Finally, the men agreed, the war was averted and the pages of the book were restored and all the things that held the book – the things that seemed insignificant, were restored.
We fast forward into time and a different place, the present.
I am in the house of a prominent collector and I’m looking at a shelf where items of great cost were shown, but not publically. These items had been gathered over the course of time and were of value to the owner, but were never shown to the public. On the bottom shelf, there was that same book (the Bible). As I picked it up, the condition was the same as it was when King David found it – the words were almost faded. When I brought this to the attention of the owner, he seemed irritated that I would even handle his book that had been gathering dust.
“The book is just the way it needs to be. If I were to restore it, the book would lose value.” He said.
The owner thought more of the book as an artifact, an ornament, a decoration, no different than any of the others. He didn’t want to restore the words on the pages of the Bible as it would devalue it and his collection. It was seen as a “thing” and nothing more, merely a completion of his collection.
The dream ended.
